march 2009: month in review

Winter loosened its icy grip, and Charge Shot!!! continued unabated.

Note the careful use of the past tense above – yes, I was too lazy to do one of these at the end of March, but if you missed it you probably could have written it yourselves without too much trouble: [month] was another [adjective] one for Charge Shot!!!. We [past tense verb] some [adjective] [plural noun], and [past tense verb] our [adverb] [present participle] audience to no end! It’s like a Mad Lib and a grammar lesson all rolled up into one.

So how’d we do?

Craig, as always, continued his excellent Audiosurf Radio posts and delivered more than a few Midnight Snacks, but you knew that already. What you might not remember is his post about an ultimate gaming reality TV show which is probably going to be up for cancellation soon,  his musings on the wonderfulness of Quake Live, and the puzzle that is Musaic Box. In case you can’t tell, Craig is the one who brings a touch of class to the place.

Rob started his March the way he starts most days, by totally dissing Halo. He also turned in one or two pieces about being an indecorous penis in online gaming arenas. Then, he wrote about Team Fortress 2 wannabe Battlefield Heroes, about his love for Dead Space and the cues it takes from System Shock 2, and the Battlestar Galactica mod he has always wanted. And who could forget his and my first steps into the weird, wonderful world of Resident Evil 5?! Since we wrote about thirty-seven posts on the damn thing and just wrapped it up a couple weeks ago, I am sure that you certainly couldn’t.

Meanwhile, I rambled about not being able to finish games, being scammed out of my hard-earned dollars, how World of Goo takes on our outwardly friendly overlords at Google, about how I don’t think we need to pay $60 for new games, and I finished up my Potent Portables series that everyone had to that point forgotten about. Also, I blew off Patapon 2 well in advance.

Dear Boivin was able to drop in briefly and whine about snipers, before turning in a Street Fighter movie review that may well be the funniest thing we’ve ever posted. After that he disappeared, like so much dust scattered to the wind. At least he posts more often than Gene.

March was also the month we welcomed one Christopher Gibbs into our midst – he kicked things off with the blistering criticism of Your Game Sucks, and may very well be the Anti-Fanboy foretold in Revelations. In between blasts of red-hot hatred, he talked about the uncanny valley and some old game he likes that no one has ever heard of. He fits right in!

We had an interview with Iji creator Daniel Remar. We wrote some briefs. We churned out some fun podcasts (yes these are coming back very soon). The amount of content we had generated at the end of our fourth complete month was impressive, and we kept it up in April, which you will hear about soon. In the meantime, check other month in review posts for more past highlights, and feel free to keep coming back every single day for the rest of forever. Really.

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marginalia: 4.30.09

The Washington Post ran an article on new business models in gaming. Flashbang, 2D Boy, and others weigh in.

All those Scrabble and Mafia games on Facebook have started quite a buzz.

We're not the only ones having trouble hitting it off with the Bionic Commando demo.

An iPhone title moves 700,000 copies. I know some AAA titles that would kill to have numbers like that.

A 5.1 percent dip in Q4 didn't stop Ubisoft from reporting 14 percent overall growth for FY08. Ghost Recon 4, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Call of Juarez 2 and HAWX: Gay Volleyball hint at another strong year for the French developer/publisher.

No no god no.

Homosexuality doesn't exist in the world of Star Wars? I suppose its easy to believe, in a sterile galaxy where no one ever bleeds or uses the bathroom or has sex.

More talking about labels, specifically that old "casual vs. hardcore" chestnut.

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non-canon!

I was watching that Mega Man rap for what must have been the millionth time, having discovered it about a month before Boivin did, when I make an Internet mistake I sometimes make – I scrolled down into the comments section. Unsurprisingly, an argument had broken out. An argument… about game canon!

You see, the rap references the year 2010 as the one in which Mega Man lives. Of course, any true fan knows that the Mega Man series doesn’t take place during any specific year, other than the vague and nebulous “200X” (and sometimes 20XX). How could Duane and Brando commit such a heinous crime? And don’t they know that Mega Man’s robot dog Rush wasn’t introduced until the third game in the series?! I mean, come on, right?

So why do we care? Every nerd on the Internet who has ever argued about the Legend of Zelda timeline knows somewhere deep down within him or herself that it doesn’t really matter, that the point of many of these games we play is not in the loose narrative but in the way the game plays and the way it feels to play it. Why, then, do people dedicate so much time to filling in the massive blanks in these games’ internal logic?

See, the thing is, some of these game narratives are scanty, but they have potential. Let’s keep Mega Man as our example – over the course of its more than twenty years, the series has continued to mutate and change in a way that few fictional universes have the opportunity to do. You have the original series, and then the Mega Man X series which takes place some hundred years afterward, and each subsequent permutation takes place about a hundred years after the last. You could do some genuinely cool things here, and sometimes the games grasp at the most basic elements, especially between the original Mega Man games and the X series. Elements in later Mega Man games occasionally foreshadow events in the X series, and the X series will sometimes allude to villains and events in the original series.

This is all well and good and all, but the way these games handle their vague links is unsatisfying at best and gratuitous at worst – these links exist, yes, but they’re not taken advantage of. To date, there is no solid link forged between any of them – these convenient hundred-year gaps in their narratives are done specifically to separate the games, not to bring them together into one narrative. The time jumps are mostly pushed by gameplay, not by the urge to forward the plot. After all, you’d effectively kill the original Mega Man series if, in one game, you joined its storyline and the storyline of the first X games - the recent success of Mega Man 9 tells us that we definitely don’t want to shut the door in the face of an actively mooing cash cow.

Of course, this phenomenon is not exclusive to Mega Man. People will forever argue about the chronological order of the aforementioned Legend of Zelda series even though it doesn’t matter even a little bit that A Link to the Past takes place before the original game. The timeline of the Castlevania series is similarly debated. People seem interested in the Resident Evil narrative, though in my experience it is a wonder when its characters string a goddamn sentence together. People wonder if the gravity is consistent from Mario game to Mario game. Why? We all know it doesn’t matter a lick, right?

Well, obviously, there’s some need that the gaming community has that developers have so far been horrible at addressing – the need for narrative. At the heart of every one of these nerd arguments is the hope that the game’s creators have some Grand Vision for it all, that Keiji Inafune had the Blue Bomber’s entire story planned out in 1987 when he started work on the first game. Many gamers have a desire for the intricate, more fleshed out stories that they sometimes see in their fan fictions.

There are still lots of problems with game narrative, chief among them the problem of integrating story with a gameplay in a way that is not jarring the way that in-game cutscenes manage to be. However, even on the forums and comment sections of our online community, there’s obviously a desire for something more. Games have the power to be the next big storytelling medium – let’s home someone figures out how to harness that power, and soon.

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Marginalia: 4.29.09

Dead Rising 2 will have multiplayer! Team Suck: Deploy.

Another Ace Attorney game headed our way! No "objections" here lolz.

Want something to tide you over until Mass Effect 2? Hope you have an iPhone.

Konami refuses to publish Six Days in Fallujah, a game about the Iraq War. Apparently we have no taste for moral ambiguity - let's hope they publish three more World War II games instead.

The first of three parts, an in-depth look at Gamestop's finances.

Further proof that WWII games are allowed to do whatever the hell they want. Continue...

Red Faction: Gorilla; or, fun with homonyms

Red Faction: Guerrilla was a game that got under my skin. You have those too, right? Something about a screenshot or an ad campaign lodges itself in a sensitive crevice and chafes away at your patience until the product’s mere mention has you gushing invectives. In Guerrilla's case, I can’t pin it down. Maybe it was the bland screenshots. Who knows? I couldn’t stand it, and when the demo went live, I downloaded it out of sheer boredom.

At face value, Guerrilla is GTA: Mars. You play an insurgent tasked with rallying miners against their sinister, faceless overseers. Open-world, vehicle-jacking - it’s all there. And then I swung my hammer. The nearby lamppost, and my baseless disdain, came crashing down.

Henceforth, I shall call the game Red Faction: Gorilla. Because that’s what you are.


History: Red Faction was a first person released in 2001 by Volition, the gentlemen/women behind the Descent and Freespace franchises (trivia: RF started off as Descent 4). It’s selling point was its Geo-Mod, or Geography Modification , technology – players would be able to destroy walls and demolish cover to their tactical advantage. To this end, Red Faction had plenty of nifty weapons, including a rocket launcher that could see through walls, and a railgun with similar capabilities. It came off half-cocked. Modifiable geography was too obviously modifiable, too contrived and too rare for too short a game. Red Faction II did nothing to advance the concept, and looked like an N64 game to boot. The franchise was like a crowd wave at a AAA baseball game aborted halfway through – well intentioned, but ultimately meh.

Maybe my lack of enthusiasm for Gorilla sounds a little more founded, now. In my opinion, this generation didn’t need a Red Faction game. It wouldn’t, were it not for Geo-Mod 2.

Geo-Mod 2 is what the series had been striving for all along, starting with the process. Structures weren’t built in the game world and then weakened – structures were built to be sound, and then dismantled. Designers encountered problems early on when they realized they weren’t architects, and their structures imploded like so much gingerbread. Every building in Gorilla is structurally sound because Geo-Mod 2 demands it be so.

And so the destruction begins. Your character is improbably well muscled, because a few minutes’ work with a sledgehammer is all it takes to reduce a small building to rubble. Demolishing a small building isn’t’ simply a matter of reducing its hit points – you need to break its supports and exploit its structural weaknesses. In the demo, you encounter an outpost jutting over a cliff, supported by three beams. Take out those beams, and the outpost drops like a bag of rocks. When the fuel tanks inside detonate, it’s a dizzying storm of girders, cement and rebar. What’s best? It won’t happen the same way twice.

Make no mistake: Geo Mod 2 is the best tech since Havok physics.

I may buy Gorilla if only to go Maxwell’s Silver Hammer all over Mars, but other mammals with more developed brains might be concerned about a few things. Half of the fun of open-world games is opening the world – in GTAIV and Far Cry 2, the game world was as compelling as the gameplay. Will Volition deliver a Mars that’s more than a scarred, rust-red desert? And if they do, will it be populated with interesting, dynamic things, or uniformly pathetic/heroic miners, and uniformly evil soldiers? I haven’t seen enough in the demo to convince me either way.

Do your ape brain a favor and download the Gorilla demo. Four years of hard work on Geo Mod 2 has delivered Volition the product they’ve wanted since 2001 – to them, I raise my glass.

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – 4/28 – Boss Battle Edition

Ever heard a song and thought, “Man, that’d be a perfect song for [fill in the blank]”?  Well that was my reaction to this week’s first song (I filled in the blank with “Boss Battle).  And it was such a strong reaction that I decided to adopt it as this week’s theme. 

It’s no surprise then that one of this week’s artist is sound designer/composer Luca Capozzi.  His work consists of articles on sound design, sounds for various synthesizers, and collections of songs traditionally referred to as albums.  His love of sound for sound’s sake translates into some music which is just perfect for scoring scenes.  (On the more random side of things, he created a file useful for sequencing DNA into midi files.)  The other two songs come from a German remixer named Plastic Vision.  Listen to them here; I’ll be shocked if you aren’t immediately transported to the 80s. 

For another week, I’ve dropped the traditional “Recommendations vs. Everything Else” structure, as again each song managed to speak to me in some way.  It’s also hard to just completely pass one or two over when there are only four tracks.  Enough about my boring writing process.  Read on for some rides!

Are you currently programming your own Steampunk RPG?  Stuck in the search for good boss music?  Well look no further.  From top to bottom, front to back, this song’s perfect.  Maybe it’s just my love for “epic” sounding music.  Or perhaps it’s the trumpets that sound in the first half (I played trumpet all through grade school).  It could just be that matching actual instruments with an electronica beat is just what the doctor ordered.  The first half of the song features a riff without an intense drum beat, which makes for some great (if slightly laid-back) traffic-matching with the strings and horns.  Toward the top of the hill (see left), a flurry of reds speeds by as the kick drum joins the party.  At the very pinnacle, a weird robot noise signals sends another burst of red and yellow before your car begins rocketing downward, a solo worthy of a bad-ass ninja wailing all the way.  The main riff (while simple enough) reappears, albeit over a much more aggressive track. From a track standpoint then, it’s almost like two different songs.  You have the pulsing, uphill opening that feels like an upbeat instrumental (and I mean real instruments) song, but then you fall back to earth rapidly while electronica overwhelms the tune.   It just cries Boss Battle, folks.  There’s even an alarm buzzer toward the end.  I mean, c’mon!  I may be shooting my wad prematurely here, but you should definitely play this song.

What the eff does this title mean?  I have no idea.  Clearly something other than zoology, but what I have no idea.  Anyway, while this song looks somewhat similar to “The Prophecy” on its graph, it is anything but.  Trade all of the cool instrumentation from “The Prophecy” and replace it with noises that sound like robots having sex and voila, “ZO-ology.”  I’m not sure what this kind of boss this would be good for aesthetically, perhaps a miniboss in some yet-to-be-created Fast and Furious game?  It’s sounds very busy sonically, but lacks a certain forward drive possessed by other, busier techno.  The traffic’s okay, though it’s hard to get a feel for how it matches when most of the song is bleeps and blips laid over drums and bass.  In the latter half of the track (when it rockets downhill but the tempo doesn’t much change), the patterns start to change as the snare drum becomes more prevalent.  Sounding like gunfire, it shoots off strings of like-colored blocks – always a challenge when the going gets a little tough.  Aside from that compliment, I’ve been unduly hard on this song.  It’s not bad.  And if you’ve liked the majority of recent techno picks, you might find this one to your liking.  I, for one, hear too many snippets of other techno songs I’ve heard, so I can’t seem to like this one on its own terms.

I spent the first half of “The trend is to stay focused all the time” (another bizarre title) suffering from techno tedium, but then the breakdown happened.  Streams of traffic swept toward me lane by lane, color by color.  The bulk of the music dropped away, leaving a simple beat and a synchronized synth that was far more engaging than the rest of the piece.  While the drums (playing a relaxed house beat) set the tone for the first section, here it felt driven by the more melodious voices.  And by voices I mean registers of electronic noise.  I recognize the inconsistency in criticizing one piece for being too electronic while praising another for its own software-generated tones, but this one just feels more musical.  The ride’s more engaging.  Having gone through the thrilling middle passage, the refrain felt more urgent than in its opening statement.  Maybe it’s not the best boss music (only your fight takes place in a discotheque), but I’ll take it.

The last three having moved me to write quite a bit, I find myself with an ironic lack of things to say about “Feel like a Bird.”  As Lebeth advertised in the pre-game screen, it definitely has an 80s vibe to it  From the particular sound of the drum machine, to the not-too-low bass, to the soaring “This would fit in a montage” melody.  Aside from the frantic drum fills spawning absurd volumes of red traffic, little about the ride struck me.  Was it fun?  I guess.  I paid attention.  But I also write a weekly article about the songs I ride.  And in this case, the song didn’t cause me to forget that.  My point being: if I’m wondering what I’ll write about while riding a song, it’s generally not a good sign.  As for this song’s boss battle, it’d have to be for some kind of The Breakfast Club game, which would probably have to be a quirky RPG three parts dating sim and seven parts dialogue tree.  Maybe you square off against the principal at the end. 

Author’s Note
All songs were ridden at least twice on Pro difficulty using Vegas and Eraser characters.  Highlight moment: finally nabbing the 30000 points per minute achievement.  Thanks “The trend is to stay focused all the time”!

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demo monday: raycatcher

I was on the road this weekend, meaning that the Xbox gets a break. Laptop in hand, I launched Steam for what was probably the first time since there was a sale on World of Goo and started digging through some demos. I found quite the treat!

Raycatcher is a music game by Thinking Studios with a slick, neon aesthetic going for it. Its elements respond to the beat of the music you happen to be listening to – in the demo’s case, some pleasant enough but ultimately forgettable techno – and it can be as hectic or as laid back an experience as you like. If it sounds like Audiosurf comparisons are inevitable, it is because they are, but I still think it’s worth a look.

You start Raycatcher as a wheel in the center of the screen, which you can rotate by moving the mouse. The wheel is composed of six circles, two each of three colors: blue, yellow and red. When the music starts, rays in these same colors start heading toward your wheel, synchronized approximately with the beat of the music you’re listening to – it’s your job to rotate the wheel so that you catch red rays with your red circles, blue rays with your blue circles, and et cetera. Once you’ve caught a certain number of rays with each circle, another layer is added to your wheel, and you begin the process anew. This is a simple enough concept.

Of course, the game would quickly get boring if this was all that was going on, so the game’s designers saw fit to mix things up a bit. For starters, some rays aren’t quite rays at all, but come toward your circle with a lazier trajectory which can make them harder to catch, especially if you’re also trying to pay attention to two or three other rays which are also headed toward you at the same time. Sometimes, two rays of the same color come at you from opposite directions and you’ve got to spin the wheel so it can catch them both at once. If things get too hectic, you can left click to clear all rays from the screen, but this loses you valuable time. To make up for it, you can right click to briefly double the number of rays that come at you, but you’d better make sure you’re ready to catch them all.

Three difficulty levels mean you can make this game as relaxing or as ludicrous as you like, much like Audiosurf. The “mellow” difficulty is a good, relaxing experience suitable for those who like to game a bit just before bedtime, while the “hardcore” difficulty will have you shouting “goddamn, where the hell is my mouse, this touchpad is the worst.” It gets a little crazy.

The full game does give you the option to build playlists with your own MP3s. I like the playlist feature, since it means you can effectively set the length of your play session based on what you wanted to listen to, or that you could try to alternate some fast and slow songs and mix gameplay up a little bit. At least, these are things I think the game would let you do – plugging in your own music isn’t an option in the demo. Even if you could, the gameplay doesn’t vary from song to song as does Audiosurf. Put a classical song into AS and you’ll get a completely different game than if you decided to listen to Korn.* Not so, I suspect, with Raycatcher. Still, it’s nice of them to put it in there.

This is getting a bit long for a post about a demo and it has no real bearing on gameplay, but it should also be said that the writing is a pleasure to read. It’s often witty an genuinely funny. More writing like this. Of course, after Resident Evil 5, any competently strung-together sentences is like a gift from the gods.

As a demo, Raycatcher is functional. It gives you your taste of the gameplay and leaves you wanting more. Still, I liked the Audiosurf demo better because it actually gave you the chance to play some of your own songs before locking you out – I think the limit was five, which was entirely reasonable. With Raycatcher, you have to assume that your music will work as well as the pre-packaged stuff does. Or, you know, you could jump online and read some reviews and figure it out. But where’s the fun in that? The demo would sell itself a little better if it would let me test drive Billie Jean before I actually made the plunge.

Buy or pass? Well, it’s no Audiosurf. I don’t think that Raycatcher has the legs or the user community or the longevity to keep our interest for as long as that game has. Still, it’s cool, it’s fun, and last time I checked its list price on Steam was a ridiculously reasonable $5. I’ve paid more for a sandwich – this one’s a buy.

*: holy shit, Korn is still around

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Midnight Snack: Indestructo Tank AE

I’ve been playing a lot of games about superpowered tanks lately.  Well, maybe just two.  I’ll probably write about PopCap’s Heavy Weapon at some length later, so for now I want to talk about another tank game I’ve been playing.

Indestructo Tank AE puts you in control of an impervious tank with a penchant for flying into the air when struck by an air-to-surface missile.  Once your tank is airborne, you can alter its trajectory, colliding with nearby aircraft and using the explosion to remain airborne.  By stringing together airborne combos of destruction, you earn experience needed to advance the level and purchase more aircraft to destroy. 

This game is old news, by Internet standards (it’s over a year old).  But two basic elements of gameplay have extended its shelf life.  First, your tank is built out of adamantium (or some other heretofore undiscovered metallurgical miracle), so you can only fail by running out of fuel.  And levels only clear when you’re on the ground, so stringing together that 80-hit combo gets a little dangerous when the fuel gauge is low and you don’t have a clear path back down to earth.  Having to juggle (get it?) this relationship between success and failure makes the later levels of the game particularly stressful.

Also, each of the five enemy aircraft affect gameplay uniquely.  Bouncers are variations on the standard plane, whose bombs linger an extra bounce, perfect for extending combos.  Gunners will only fire after locking on, but are great for mid-air bouncing.  Miners are other tanks with great lift, useful for saving you a combo if the planes disappear.  And homers are by far the most wily of the five, firing heat-seeking missiles that often hit your tank in mid-air, blasting you skyward.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost because homing missiles wouldn’t let me back down to the ground. 

The AE stands for Anniversary Edition, and the game’s got a quick play mode, medals, and a co-op mode I’ve never tried.  These extras are irrelevant, in my opinion.  It’s the straightforward normal mode that makes it for me.  It reconciles the zen-like experience of a simple goal and a simple control scheme with the joy of watching a tank fly through the air ripping helicopters and jets to pieces. 

It also somehow inspired me to write four hundred words.  I tip my hat to you, Indestructo Tank. 

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It is very important that you see this

This has been around for a while but a friend just brought it to my attention yesterday and I think that it is quite relevant given our dear blog's love for the Blue Bomber.

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

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Free your...um, Space

God Bless Good Old Games. GOG.com sells gone-but-not-forgotten PC favorites for the price of a happy meal, DRM-free and downloaded straight to your hard drive. If I sound like a pitch man, maybe I am. Last year, they sold me Descent 3, a cornerstone of my adolescence; a few weeks ago, they sold me Freespace 2.

If you’ve heard of the Freespace series, I’ll give you twenty bucks. Really. Unless you count Chris Roberts’ swansong Freelancer, Freespace 2 was the last of the space-sims, a genre whose pedigrees include the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series and the Wing Commander games. These games all boiled down to the same irreducible sauce: Tearing ass across the black vacuum, blowing the shit out of enemy fighters and watching massive capital ships duke it out. In all of these aspects, Freespace 2 is the genre’s zenith.

And despite a decade between its release and today, it holds up stunningly well.


In Freespace 2, you play a pilot in the United…you know what? Forget it. You play a pilot, and you advance through the ranks, rising through squadrons and fighters until you’re pretty much Our Only Hope. The story is remarkable for its engrossing writing and voice-acting, not its singular novelty. You’ve heard it all before, and paraphrasing would only do it a disservice.

Play mechanics are where Freespace 2 truly shines. Space-sims, despite taking place in space, have never truly grasped the physics of the void – in the Star Wars games, X-Wings flew much line airplanes without gravity. In the Independence War games, the grasp was a bit too stern – a touch of throttle would send you careening across the galaxy, spinning on all axis. Freespace 2 imagines the fluidity of space combat to be slippery, but accessible. Hit the afterburners, and your ship shudders reassuringly. Pull a hard left, and you drift a tad. It’s not the dizzying ballet of mayhem see in Battlestar Galactica engagements (still waiting on that one, Industry. C’mon), but it’s accessible.

By accessible, I mean you won’t get killed trying to not spin into the sun – there’s still plenty of nuance and depth to the gameplay. Your four quadrants of shields can be adjusted according to where you take the most damage, and energy subsystems – weapons, engines and shields – can be tweaked depending on your need to kill, run, or survive. A ship with energy-draining guns, for example, might put extra juice into their weapons; an interceptor might boost the engines; a bomber diving headlong into flak will want to beef up its shields. If this sounds like a lot of keystrokes, it is – it takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it.

It was a longstanding complaint against space-sims that the capital ships were never big enough – not even TIE Fighter could trump the sense of mass conveyed by the opening scene of Star Wars: A New Hope, where a Star Destroyer takes, like, ten minutes to thunder overhead. Freespace 2 captures that enormity. The larger capital ships stretch for kilometers, and to see two dreadnoughts duking it out with fusillades of beam weapons and torpedoes is breathtaking even by today’s standards.

Yeah, Freespace 2 is well worth your 5.99 – but if it’s so great, why couldn’t it keep the genre alive? By 1999, people had already stopped caring. The first previews for Warcraft 3 were out., and games like Starlancer and X-Wing Alliance weren’t seeing the blockbuster sales the genre was accustomed to. Maybe gamers got tired of managing shield distribution the same way they got tired of trimming flaps and managing altitude in hardcore flight sims. As a medium, games are trending towards a big fat EASY button (thanks, Wii!), and the more micromanagement a genre requires, the less likely it is to find an audience among soccer moms and five-year-olds.

GOG.com goes through the trouble of optimizing its games for a spread of Operating Systems. Surprisingly, it works. While Descent 3 needed a little jiggling to make the right sounds, Freespace 2 ran flawlessly. Not once did the game freeze, blue-screen or dump me to the desktop. That’s more than I can say for some contemporary releases.

Freespace 2 is more than a nostalgia trip – in fact, I’m convinced the genre still has some life in it. But that’s just me. Visit Good Old Games, and if you have 5.99 rattling around in your pocket, think about it.

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An Open Letter to Blitz: The League

Dear Blitz: The League,

I have to give you props, Blitz. You’ve got balls. Sure, I haven’t played your next (I mean current) gen version, so I don’t know what you’ve been up to lately. But I did drop a 10-spot on your PS2 version and I must say:

I’m a little impressed.

Sure, you’re load times are longer than Titanic. And your AI operates in rubberbands between two modes: village idiot and Stephen Hawking. But I must give you credit for attempting to expand the potential of your genre. All without an actual NFL license.

In fact, losing that license may have been the best thing for you. Well, you didn’t quite lose that license as much as EA bought it and shoved it in its giant pile of gold. But without the burdens of a cover curse or boring real-life players, your writers (of the controversial ESPN program Playmakers) were free to create a rich alternate history of American football.

Take your main antagonist team: the New York Nightmare. In your fiction, the original New York team perished in a plane crash and the newspaper headline read “NEW YORK NIGHTMARE.” When the city’s franchise rebooted years later, the team donned the headline as a name, becoming the fearsome army that sits atop the standings from the start. Lore like this helps establish a world in which your bloody, bastardized game of pigskin might exist – as opposed to say, Blood Bowl, which (while entertaining) confuses me by awkwardly slapping Warhammer armies on football.

Try not to feel too bad about your actual narrative, though. We all know it’s not that great. I do like how it starts with the NY Nightmare injuring a member of the player’s team and sending them to the bottom of the ladder. But the cut-scenes are just clumsy, man. I know, you’re using the antiquated Emotion Engine, but there’s no reason I should be confusing who’s who in a strip joint bar brawl. Or be embarrassed by your bizarre attempt at an illicit romance plot between rookie sensation and head cheerleader. I am, however, a fan of your in-game story moments, of which there are simply too few. What comes to mind is one big game when a rival squad purposefully injured the talented rookie, removing him from the in-game active roster for a few weeks.

Also, don’t sweat the fact that your engine can’t handle snow. Every time I played the Minnesota Reapers (great name, btw), the game would grind during snowy kickoffs. But it’s okay, one of my favorite games regularly drops below 20 fps.

So yes, you’re clunky and you’re engine is hella busted. But I have to applaud your aspirations when compared to other attempts to mix up the sports genre. As I mentioned, Blood Bowl will probably be fun, but I still don’t understand how the Lizardmen and the Skaven (aka rat-people) learned to play football. Sure, I love checking the crap out of people as much as the next guy, but a series like NHL Hitz felt limited by its license. At that point, you’re simply offering arcade gameplay with a limited licensed roster and stupid unlockables. (Sharkpeople ring a bell?)

You, Blitz: The League, feel like more than arcade football. You’ve got some nice top-down design choices going on. Steroids factor in at every level: they’re used mid-game, in between games, and discussed in the narrative. The player can spend money (earned by being a badass on the field) in a game, and then spend it hiring female escorts to distract an upcoming opponent. And it all plays into your blood-soaked, drug-juiced world.

You’ve got some hefty flaws, but I don’t regret the time we spent together. The satisfaction of powerbombing an uppity quarterback or Matrix-jumping over a defensive line was not just arcade silliness (though it was often ludicrous). It all felt justified in a fictional world where violence is necessary for victory.

Thanks for the memories,
Craig

P.S. Seriously though, I wouldn’t wish your PS2 version on anyone. I regularly microwaved Hungry Man dinners and learned new languages during your interminable load screens. I hear tell your 360 version saw those bugs fixed, and fans of this genre would surely dig your sequel.

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weapons of choice: the shotgun!

You’re never alone in a video game – even if you’re wandering the creepy, empty halls of some burned-out mansion, you’re still surrounded. Not just by enemies, either – on every side, you’re surrounded by crates and barrels and power-ups, all waiting for you to find them, grab them and use them with extreme prejudice. Some of the coolest things about these games we play are the tools we use to get the job done. I think it might be good to talk about some of them.

Of all the guns in all the games I have played, one stands alone. Of course, because you started with the title of this post and worked your way down, you know I am talking about the good old shotgun! Chick-chick, boom!

It is a weapon that fits my particular play style, the one where I jump in headfirst without always looking at the enemies hidden behind the column or standing on either side of the door. I don’t always think everything out, and the shotgun encourages my lack of foresight – those enemies surrounding you are easy fodder for the shottie, with its close range and wide spread. This is a look at some of my most favorite shotguns, and you are going to read it!

Let’s start with a game we’ve all been talking entirely too much about lately, Resident Evil 5. I played very nearly the entire game using the handgun and the trusty shotgun just because there wasn’t much need for anything else. The thing could clear the room in two or three shots, and in one of the game’s many claustrophobic fight sequences it was truly invaluable. The game’s Mercenaries mode is essentially one long unbroken stretch of close-quarters fighting, and it’s great for racking up killer combos.

All shotguns are good for that sort of thing, though. When evaluating such a wondrous weapon from game to game, it’s sometimes not enough just to think about the things that any shotgun will do – context is important! Take, for example, the shotgun in Half Life 2. That game doled out new weapons at a slow but steady clip until the very end of the game, giving them to you just in the nick of time – this kept things interesting throughout, and has the side effect of associating particular weapons with specific areas of the game. The shotgun is given to you in the genuinely nerve-wracking Ravenholm stretch, a section of game that throws you into a near-deserted town filled with shrieking monsters and not much else. Since the enemies are simply too fast to allow for effective use of the handgun or machine gun, the shotgun is here especially indispensable, and remains satisfying for the duration. An excellent wepon, all around.

Naturally, the design of the shotgun is also worth noticing – they can’t all be sleek black implements of destruction. My second favorite thing about Bioshock, after the striking and unparalleled design of the city of Rapture itself, was the attention to detail. Each weapon is not just rendered lovingly, but thoughtfully – these tools look like they belong in an underwater city-turned-grave, where they were cobbled together by people desperate to either attack others or protect themselves. Looking closely, one can recognize normal household objects embedded into each of them – if you’re interested in seeing what I’m talking about, I definitely recommend that you take a look at some of the game’s concept art. It’s very enlightening.

So, these are a few of my favorite shotguns! What do you guys like?

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Real Time Simplicity: A Talk with Rudolf Kremers and Alex May

They say that limitation breeds creativity.  In the world of game design, this axiom often goes ignored.  We regularly see games with gargantuan budgets and five-year production calendars fail because they feel stale just a few hours in.  With every rehashed engine and recycled plot device, design stagnation threatens to infect the entire industry.

Enter Dyson.  Rudolf Kremers and Alex May entered TIGSource’s Procedural Generation competition in May of 2008 and were given a mere thirty days to complete their entry.   The result was a masterfully distilled RTS experience, with a slick visual design and engrossing sound.  They won second place, continued updating the game, and eventually submitted it to the IGF, where it received a nomination for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.  Word on the street is they’re in digital distribution talks with the likes of Steam and Direct2Drive.  That’s called climbing up the ladder, folks.

We’ve written before about why Dyson’s simple, elegant design makes it a worthy entry into RTS canon.  But as for how it evolved from a humble, forum-competition prototype to an indie success story, we still had some questions.  Luckily, Alex and Rudolf happen to be nice guys and provided us with some answers.

Charge Shot!!!: Tell us the story of Dyson's development. How long did it take to produce the game? What was the most difficult or time-consuming stage?

Rudolf Kremers: The original version took us exactly one month to produce as that was the scope of the competition it was created for. We are still developing it as we speak, to be finished sometime after the summer. I think that will take the total development time up to about a year.

Alex May: Yep, over a year (original competition was May 2008 I think) of mostly spare-time work.

CS: Many notable indie games launch with a narrative about the sole author/developer and his five-year development journey. You guys worked as a team and managed to make Dyson in a relatively short amount of time.  How did you two team up, and how did you divvy up responsibilities to maximize effectiveness in a short development cycle?

RK: After Alex sprung me from that jail in Columbia and our nano-implants were returned to us it was easy really.   Ahem, additionally, we made sure that we let the design AND the tech do a lot of the work for us, which was in perfect keeping with the goals of the competition anyway. Small seeds contain large amounts of complexity.

AM: We cut features until it was doable. We were merciless. It would have been impossible without the implants. The initial month deadline really helped in that regard, actually. In fact lots of indie games had original prototypes that were made in much less time than that (see Kyle Gabler's recent global game jam keynote on prototyping in 48 hours:  http://snurl.com/b0avx)

CS: Early in your development blog, you made reference to some of Dyson's influences - the Little Prince, Dyson trees, etc.  Are there any influences that are more subtle?  Any games you looked to for inspiration?

RK: For me personally it is a general feeling of trying to capture the beauty and sense of wonder that is hidden in hard-core concepts from science fiction, space exploration and science, in an original game friendly setting. It is all about old but vivid obsessions from youth with this kind of stuff.

AM: I had a lot of graphical inspiration from other games over the years. I was making procedural tree simulations a decade ago. A cloud in the sky would turn into a storm just like in Fire & Ice by Andrew Braybrook, and lightning would shoot down onto the trees and they'd catch fire just like in Populous 2. A fire engine would drive onto the screen to put them out, then more would grow. The simple visuals were inspired by vector games like Gravitron and Geometry Wars, but I didn't want the neon-on-black look. Blueberry Garden and Circle were two projects that helped me break out of that visual trap.

CS: What, if anything, are you trying to communicate with Dyson's stark visuals?

AM: To an extent the graphics are a function of the game's simplicity. I like the idea that everything the player can see is something that matters in the simulation or the game. Most games these days have a graphical fidelity that is many orders of magnitude greater than the fidelity of the interactive system. This is silly. It's stupid. Some of the best games are deeply interactive, to the extent that if you can see it you can interact with it in some way. It breaks down when you have things added to the game that look great but don't affect the player in any way, or worse trick them into thinking there's more to the game than there is. Our game is still very simple in terms of interactive entities, and the graphics reflect that.

CS: Dyson's clean graphics and slick aesthetic both contribute to its low-key vibe, but what really sells this aspect of the game is its subtle soundtrack. Tell us about Brian Grainger, aka Milieu, composer of the game's music - did you ask him "give us something chill," or did he just look at the game and make music to match?

RK: Brian is this brilliant independent composer who also runs a record label. He is very good and I am fan of ambient music, which he has made a fair bit of. I had approached him about his music as a fan, but when Dyson was developing into something really nice I suggested to Alex that we ask him to use some of his music. Not only was he happy to oblige, he then started to create new music and audio for the game, which is more than a little bit cool. I am glad you commented on this by the way, I think it is absolutely essential to the atmosphere and mood we want from the game.

AM: Not many people seem to realize the importance of the music to Dyson as a game. We've got a lot of work to do on the sound effects but it wouldn't be anywhere near as good without the music Brian's made for it.

CS: Dyson has had quite a long development process (with good reason, obviously).  It started as an entry in a time-crunch competition, but has continued to evolve in the months since.  What about the game continues to engage you as developers?

RK: In some ways the game's potential scope, as opposed to its viable scope, is enormous. There is a certain amount of tension between what you could do with a game like this and between the minimalist design/development ethos we adopted for Dyson. We are in a situation where we can only achieve so much within limited time, and yet we have a massive canvas to fill. Dealing with these two extremes is very enjoyable in my opinion.

CS: From a developer's standpoint, what do you feel Dyson lacks?  Given more time or resources, is there anything you would change?

RK: The game is unfinished and we have detailed plans to finalize the game, which we are implementing now. As it stands it is unbalanced and misses some key features.

AM: We've got the time and resources to make a great game by Autumn, so that's what we're going to try to do. We'll be trying to bring out the real flavors of the game, so that people who want to really appreciate it on a deeper level can do so. Right now it is quite a superficial game.

CS: To follow that up, you've made continual improvements to Dyson - the explosive pods, an essential defensive mechanism and a big part of the game, strategically, were only added relatively recently. Looking beyond your most recent build, do you see yourselves making any big gameplay-changing alterations? We would personally like to see a "random map" mode where you set the parameters for the level you'd like to play...

RK: It is a popular request and extremely likely to end up in the final game. NOTE: This is not a promise.  The gameplay will still be enhanced, at times in a major way, but they are all logical additions.

AM: The more we mention now, the more we hype up features that may not make it into the final game. I think some kind of random level generator is bound to end up in the game, in some form or other. I mean, right now, each of the 6 scenarios in the game is randomly generated each time you play, so to an extent that's already in there.

CS: Define "logical additions" - I know you're trying to avoid promising any features that eventually get cut from the game, but how big are we talking here? Different types of trees? More attributes for the Dyson, or the planets from which they spring?

RK: Logical additions are gameplay mechanics that are appropriate or respectful of the gameplay that fits Dyson and the world in which it takes place. You will have to torture me to get me to say more!

CS: You've said that you have no plans for a multiplayer component for Dyson - we'd desperately like one, but we understand the difficulties you face from a programming perspective. Do you think that you might follow Dyson up with something more multiplayer-centric, or is this something that's on your radar?

RK: I have a multiplayer focused game in the works, www.neopolis-game.com which takes some elements from Dyson and puts it into a more suitable multiplayer format.

AM: I've got plans for a multiplayer game, but it won't play anything like Dyson, or much like anything else you've ever played.   Someone made their own multiplayer version of Dyson, if you want to check it out you can find it here: http://apiservers.com/hosted/marzec/quantum

CS: Looking at Quantum, I see much more of a Geometry Wars influence there - lots of glowing neon on a dark background. I assume this is what you were trying to avoid when you chose the game's current color scheme?

AM: Yes, that's exactly what happened. I wanted to make a glowy vector game, because that would make the graphics easy to generate in a procedural manner. But I was sick of seeing neon on black as a color scheme and there were several games around in development at the time that gave me the idea to basically invert the colors.

CS: Dyson was made as an entry into the TIGSource Procedural Generation competition.  If you ran your own such design competition, what kind of parameters would you set to inspire creativity?

AM: There's a great thread about this in the TIGForum. I don't like aesthetic themes as much, like "game must include pirates" - if you try you can still be very creative, but most people would just focus on piratey imagery and not incorporate that into the game design. The best ideas for me were things like Non-violence and Earth Day, and concepts like evolution or immortality. But really, any framework at all seems to get most people thinking about interesting ideas, so it's all good.

CS: Speaking of the TIGSource Competition, games using procedural generation seem to be cropping up more and more, especially in the indie world.  Could you talk a little bit about the concept and its general impact on game design?

RK: It is a massive boon in terms of ease of production. There is no difficult asset pipeline, nobody has to wait for things to get modeled and animated in Max or Maya and most importantly, it facilitates rapid iteration of ideas. In the case of Dyson it completely fits the foundation of the game design, which lies in subjects that are closely related to procedural generation.

CS: We've noticed that you have deals with Steam and other services coming up. Give it to us straight - how long before Dyson starts costing us money? What do you think a fair price is, and what do you think of the bang-for-buck ratio of indie games and DLC in general?

RK: The game has a release date at the end of July, so that is as straight up as it is going to be.  We are currently considering a $20 price point but have not yet made a final decision. A fair price is one where we provide a game that feels like it is worth the money you have spent on it. This can be completely different from game to game, or even from person to person. When it comes to most indie games I think that people generally get a fair or even very good deal. Compare it to the price of new so-called "AAA" games and decide for yourself I say.

CS: As the industry takes a broadside fusillade from the economic crisis, mega-titles like Halo are beginning to seem overblown and wasteful, while titles like Braid and World of Goo gain fresh recognition and respect. Do you think the recession could be an opportunity for indie games?

RK: I have to say I never think about this while working on our own games. I suppose providing a good game for a lower price point than hugely expensive big budget games is timely considering the decreasing budgets that people have, but I think there is place for all kinds of games. Massive budget, studio making/breaking, monster, blockbusters and games like the one we are making. On a related note however, having worked on big budget titles myself, I do think that many of these "AAA" games can be made much better and faster than they are now, the waste that goes on due to bad project management and tools and technology can only be described as grotesque.

CS: You mentioned a few things you thought developers often get wrong - i.e., investing more effort in the graphics than the gameplay. What do you think a game like Dyson says to an industry obsessed with Hollywood-style development and a production budget to match?

RK: I reckon not too much, we are so small in comparison that we fly under the radar.  But in more serious terms... I am not sure, I think it may make for an interesting interview if you are able to get somebody from that world to comment on the indie scene.

CS: Games have evolved to the point where many require eight buttons, two sticks, and some sort of goofy tilt control.  RTS games, in particular, regularly come with a litany of complex keyboard commands, which must be studied intensely for high-level play.  Dyson's two-button, scroll-wheel mouse controls deviate noticeably from this trend.  How do you think this relates to your simple, yet elegant aesthetic?

RK: We are going to make it even simpler.  One of our challenges is to provide deep and immersive strategic gameplay to people who have never gotten into 4x [see here] or RTS games, and to do so you simply cannot just adopt the old conventions of the genre and slap some great visuals on it. The design also has to fulfill its part, after the visuals have already done their job. The idea is to let the player slowly learn the game without noticing the interface too much. As opposed to the interface being a barrier that the player has to break through. Imagine only being able to enjoy music by learning an instrument first? I think for many inexperienced gamers that is what it feels like when they pick up a joypad or keyboard and mouse and are confronted with 19 pages of explanation on how to enjoy the game. I'd like to improve on that.

CS: For any RTS gamer, tempo is key - you want to be aggressive while not stretching yourself too thin. I've always been a blitzkrieg expansionist, and that's gotten me in trouble more than once in Dyson. How does the game make real-time strategists reevaluate their tried-and-true tactics?

RK: Mainly by accepting the game for what it is. It is by no means perfect, but it tries to be consistent within its own rules set, and we don't really implement anything we think is extraneous to our goals. This means that there will be some overlap between RTS and 4x ideas simply because sometimes the same problem requires the same solution, but often things are done in their own way.

CS: Bringing it back to your comments on graphical fidelity versus interactive systems in games - two of us have been playing through Resident Evil 5, and while we're impressed with the graphics, we're not so impressed by the fact that we can only interact with a fraction of what we see, and that we keep killing the same five basic zombies over and over again. What, do you think, are easy ways to help the player feel more engaged in their environment?

RK: That is a simple question that demands a 30 page answer. In fact I have done exactly that written several chapters on this subject in my book on level design that I have now nearly finished and should come out later this year. (PLEASE BUY IT) Ahem, that wasn't very subtle was it?

Well, to give a hint, there are several ways of keeping players immersed in their game environment, but many of them revolve around making the environment itself an important reward mechanism as well as a place you enjoy spending time in. In the case of Dyson that is easy to see: almost everything in the environment has a potentially interesting gameplay function as well as being interesting or beautiful in its own right, independent of gameplay actions.

CS: Often what gets cut and why can be just as interesting as the stuff that actually makes it into the game. To wrap this up, any other big ideas that have been tested and cut before version 1.20?

RK: I'd rather you ask us that again after we release the game.  :-)

We’d like to thank Alex and Rudolf for chatting with us.  Again, you can find the current build of Dyson along with further info on the game at www.dyson-game.com.  Rudolf’s book Level Design: Concept, Theory, & Practice (Publ: AK. Peters) should be out later this year, and you can find news on his other projects, including Neopolis, over at Omni-Labs.  Check out Alex’s other work, specifically the plans for his zombie-survival game Deadrock, at his development blog.

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This Either Proves God’s Existence or His Glaring Absence

If you are old enough to remember arcades that weren’t prefixed with the word “Live” then you’re probably familiar with Marvel vs. Capcom and its aptly-named sequel, Marvel vs. Capcom 2. If not, allow me to explain the premise: Marvel characters are awesome. Capcom characters are awesome. They all fight each other.

Okay, it’s a little more sophisticated than that, but not much. The series’ claim to fame was its over-the-top special and super moves. With a simple quarter circle forward and punch, a player could launch a full-scale psychic/robotic/nuclear attack right in an opponent’s face. While not particularly original (the series was born from different, earlier iterations of the same idea), Marvel vs. Capcom endeared itself to players by being larger: the original MvC had dozens of characters, side characters, and special combos. MvC 2 was more of the same, only prettier and crazier.

All this coupled with a shallow difficulty curve makes it easy to see why these games have remained in the collective subconscious of fighting gamers for the better part of a decade. Ironically, that’s also why this news* seems so…bittersweet.

Don’t get me wrong, I would absolutely love to see Marvel vs. Capcom 2 get the HD treatment like its grandpappy -- or even just achievements that confirm exactly how awesome I am at the game (and I am QUITE awesome) -- but I’d love an entirely new game even more. I’ve played MvC 2 on no fewer than three consoles in my lifetime, and while I’ve enjoyed the hell out of each experience I’m ready for a fresh one. It’s been nearly ten years since the game first hit market, so let’s take the plunge and get a new game going!

Ah well. I’ll take what I can get.

*The website www.tu4ar.com is thought to be an abbreviation of the lyrics on the character select screen in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, hence the speculation that the game in question is simply a rerelease. Also, the big “2” in the background.

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exclusive coverage

One of Sony’s aces in the hole in the halcyon days of the Playstation 2 was the third party exclusive – lots of studios were willing to develop their games just for the PS2 because the install base was so big that a return on one’s investment was entirely possible without having to worry about that whole “porting your game to three consoles with wildly different innards” thing.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that’s no longer true – even Square Enix, who delivered two mainline Final Fantasy games exclusively to the PS2, are jumping the exclusivity ship for Microsoft’s error-prone computer box.

Not to worry, though – Sony is still attempting to get back into its comfort zone, this time by offering developers money to develop exclusively for the Playstation Network, their downloadable game service. Called “Pub Games,” this program looks to give developers who meet certain (undefined) standards of quality some extra cash and more marketing muscle to get their games out there. In a turbulent economy and an overcrowded marketplace, I can’t say I blame the people who run for cover under this umbrella, even though I think more than halving your game’s potential audience by excluding some 30 million Xbox 360 owners also has to have some negative impact on your bottom line.

Honestly, I’m just mad that I can’t play stuff like this and Flower and Fat Princess without having to drop a ridiculous $400 for a game console two-and-a-half years after its release. It is time for a price cut, guys.

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This Week on Audiosurf Radio – 4/21 – Some Guy from Ohio Edition

By all accounts, Josh Woodward is just some guy from Ohio.  He’s one of those Internet indie guitarists.  You know those guys.  They put up all their music for free on their website.  And when I say all their music, I mean all of it.  Like six albums’ worth.  And they like to write oddly catchy tunes about heartbreak, girls, and keeping people under your stairs (seriously).  

This week all five tracks come from the prolific Mr. Woodward.  They’re off his 2006 joint Only Whispering, on which he does a lot more than whisper.  Way to mislabel your album, sir. 

To mix it up, I eschewed a traditional “Recommendations” section this time around, as all five songs gave me something to discuss.  First time for everything!

A sweet, forlorn tune. The music, with its laid-back melancholy, feels best suited for a coffeehouse or freshman quad.  But with the Steep tag on, the problems of isolation presented in the lyrics become pressing.  Woodward’s tone shifts from what might be considered brooding when you’re watching him over a steaming latte to a more active searching.  Though I’m sure it’s not what he intended, the tension of the ride adds an otherwise nonexistent layer to the song.  Traffic isn’t heavy, but it moves quickly, making it hard to plan pickups and even harder should you make one minor mistake.  Quite a metaphor for life, I’d say.

This ride is, well, it’s alright.  Visually, it’s got a lot of potential, as Woodward’s longing croons generate a lot of tunnels.  There are also plenty of quick hills in the track, the ones that feel like someone’s at the other end flapping it like a dusty rug.  The traffic remains mellow, despite the Steep tag, so you’ll be hard pressed to get a high score on this one.  I can’t quite tell what he’s dealing with lyrically.  Maybe it’s about a breakup, or maybe it’s about helping a girl through an abortion – sensitive material, already tread expertly by Mr. Folds.  Folds’ influence is all over this song, as is that of Sufjan Stevens in his quieter moments.  Not to mention that parts of the melody bear an uncanny resemblance to the opening of “Space Oddity.”  Puzzling lyrics and blatant influences aside, you should ride this song if you value Audiosurf’s potential as a visualizer over its game aspect.

If you look at the graph for this one, it shouldn’t be too hard to find the pattern of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus.  I don’t point that out as a negative.  In fact, the tight, familiar structure lies at the heart of this song’s success.  The song is about bidding your comfort zone goodbye, and the comfort zone of pop songwriting is used to its fullest here.  Verses build expectedly toward choruses.  The second chorus gives way to an uphill bridge, which in turn sets up an even more fervent final chorus.  Each section spawns different patterns of traffic, which fit in with the theme of forward motion in the lyrics.  This is highlighted in the track by tunnels cropping up in accordance with chiming bells, signaling a change of seasons.  “Goodbye to Spring” may sound like something you’ve heard before.  And it may ride like something you’ve ridden before.  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play this song.

Quite honestly, this one surprised me.  Repeatedly.  The opening elicited a hearty “meh,” with Woodward just plucking on his guitar.  I assumed I was in for a fairly downtempo meditation on bored people in positions of power.  Instead, Woodward skillfully ratchets up the intensity in segments.  What starts as plucking soon turns to upbeat strumming, which is soon joined by some fantastic slap bass.  Then he kicks it up a notch again, adding electric guitar.  All of this serves to support the song’s theme of fruitless escalation.  He sings about drinking prom queens, juicing baseball players, and a president “pushing buttons with a half-baked plan/Like a stoner with a PS2” trying to “beat his daddy’s score.”  I haven’t decided if the lyrics feel forced.  In the meantime, I’ll give him credit for making me interested enough to look them up.  Don’t be fooled by the broken bell curve or the low traffic count, this one’s worth your time.  If even just to weigh in on his lyrics.

Again the Steep tag passes with (literal) flying colors.  “Fit for a King” resembles the work of Jonathon Coulton, with its tight vocal harmonies, pop/folk vibe, and storytelling lyrics.  The song tells a story of a boastful monarch who throws a banquet to celebrate recent tyrannical triumphs.  Our narrator stabs the king and (I love this line) watches “His bloodline spewing upon the marble.”  Woodward matches this dramatic moment with a huge crescendo in the music, mimicked wonderfully by the track, which begins careening at a breakneck pace.  Red tunnels abound, weaving back and forth like so many trails of blood.  Sure, it sounds a little gross.  And of course it’s melodramatic.  But the ride’s a blast, and at the end of the day that’s all I need.

Author’s Note
Each song was played on the Pro difficulty using the Vegas and Eraser characters.  I need to spend some non-blogging time to really delve into Pointman use.  I’m sure it can only do me good.

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Retired Dudes Want Money, Madden to Get Screwed

Fresh off the heels of John Madden’s retirement from broadcasting, news drops (via GamePolitics) of another lawsuit slapped on the gaming industry by disgruntled NFL retirees.

For those not uneducated in the sports genre (boringly simulated or preposterously arcade-y), recent iterations of sports franchises have included retired players for pure fan service.  You can match the ‘86 Bengals with the ‘08 Bengals and see which version of your favorite team the computer thinks is better.  Or you can loose Hall of Fame players like Babe Ruth and Cy Young into an unsuspecting baseball simulator and watch as high-ceiling prospects lose jobs to long-dead, overweight superstars.

Unfortunately, EA has been less than forthright about their use of retired NFL players.  Last year, retirees managed to squeeze $28 million from the NFL Players Association for suggesting to EA that they should scramble the identities of retirees to avoid royalties.  They’re also gunning for Madden, citing the royalties he’s received while they’ve been left in the dust.

This was all kicked off (ha) by a post on Dave Pear’s life-post-football blog, with supplemental info to be found over at Retired Players For Justice.  While I’m sure this won’t permanently damage the Madden game brand, it’ll be interesting to watch how this battle with the big dogs at EA plays out. 

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demo monday: the dishwasher, dead samurai

So I had this idea for this thing called “Demo Monday.” I decided to call it “Demo Monday” and not something cutesy like “DeMonday” because that sort of brings demons to mind and while we might decide to be a blog about demons next April 1 for right now I think I just want to write about game demos for right now thanks very much.

So! I’ll be downloading and playing and writing about a different game demo every Monday from now on – that’s because it’s not very time or cash intensive and it exposes me (and you!) to a more varied set of experiences – I find myself writing about the same games and types of games over and over, and this may well be a good way to expand my vocabulary. I’ll write about the game, I’ll write about the effectiveness of the given demo, and I’ll tell you whether I think it’s worth your money. This week, I decided to try out the Xbox Live Arcade’s The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.

Some background – Dishwasher is a sidescrolling beat-‘em-up, obviously inspired by Alien Hominid. It’s also an Xbox Live Community title selected to be released as a full-blown Live Arcade title right alongside the professionally-developed heavy hitters from Microsoft and others. Needless to say, it doesn’t exactly stand up to them visually – while there are occasionally some impressive effects, most of it doesn’t exceed the standards of a well-done Flash game. That’s probably the best way to describe Dishwasher, actually – if we could run this thing from within the confines of Firefox, it’d probably be worth a Midnight Snack recommendation, but as an Xbox Live Arcade title (that goes for $10!) it’s a little less impressive.

It’s got sort of a neat visual style, all dirty and dark with lots of blood – the sort of thing that would probably have appealed to me a lot more when I was sixteen, but it will still have its fans. Ignore the story, though, or what there is of it – told in a series of blurry, ambiguous comic book panels, the presentation could be cool but ends up being superfluous. As with many beat-‘em-ups, there is a combo system one could acquaint oneself with, but as with many beat-‘em-ups there’s no real need – mashing the buttons works just about as well. Audio is a mostly predictable collection of grunts and techno music. Not much to report there.

As a demo, it succeeds from a gameplay standpoint – just as it ends, you pick up a new weapon and move into a new area – you get a glimpse of the game’s potential, but it doesn’t give you so much that you’re not interested in more. However, from a presentation standpoint, a grammar nazi can find faults - “airborn” instead of “airborne,” and the sentence “If you’re low on health, kill grunts for more health” are notable blemishes. A demo is like a cover letter – little mistakes like that don’t really matter, but leaving in typos is a good way to get passed over by a discerning eye.

So, buy or pass? I’m not super enthusiastic about this one, but it is fun enough in its way, and I think the extra weapons and abilities unlocked later in the game might make it worthwhile. The asking price is just a bit much – for $5, I’d consider it, but for $10 I’m going to have to pass. There’s nothing going on here you can’t find somewhere else.

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Team Suck v. Resident Evil 5: Round Goodbye

It’s over.

No more bosses. No more Wesker. No more loading screens, reload times or green herbs. No more of the painful cutscenes, the try-and-try-again quick time events, or the plot that metastasized from hammy to idiotic to flat-out insulting. No more of any of these things that sullied one of the most hyped games of all time, rendering a potentially genre-defining game into a ho-hum gorefest, a seven-oh through and through.

I snipe, I moan, I spit bile. And yet, I will miss Resident Evil 5, because for all of the game’s flaws, I had fun.


Team Suck 2/2 Andrew “COME ON” Cunningham has wondered more than once if he was enjoying the game in spite of itself – if it was only the stunning wit and consummate skill of yours truly that kept the game afloat in his esteem. Having finally played the game through to its perfectly ludicrous conclusion, I can say with confidence that Andrew was right. Resident Evil 5 is a well-heeled dinner party filled with your least favorite people – more fun to trash, ridicule and utterly destroy.

We’ve already picked through most of the issues, including (but not limited to) sluggish controls, inexcusable dialogue, a wacky story and a total lack of difference from its five-year-old predecessor. “Picked through” is putting it kindly – we’ve beaten this game into a slurry of guts, hair and teeth. Why the harsh treatment? How can we keel-haul a game whose overall critical reception is a thumbs-up?

Simply : this game should have been better. Resident Evil 4 was an incredible game, and we were right to expect similar excellence from RE5. Hell, we heralded it on this blog – I lauded the demo, and anticipated an edgier, shockingly relevant installment in a notoriously brain-dead franchise. Instead, we were handed a prettier, potentially dumber sequel. To take no steps at all is bad enough; to take a step backwards is absolutely inexcusable.

My chief disappointment has nothing to do with gameplay. Resident Evil 5 is set in Africa, a fact that has been bandied about by cultural critics and racism bell-ringers. Bold move for an action game – by necessity, you need to at least recognize the political implications of your decision. As I write, a two-legged regime in Zimbabwe is hardly closer to peace than it was six months ago, when a rigged election sent an opposition leader into hiding; rebel armies in the Congo halted a bloody advance scarcely months ago; Darfur remains a baffling human rights crisis; Somalia is a haven for pirates, terrorists and warlords.

Listen: you can’t sex this up and cram it into a Michael Bay movie set. It’s wrong. By simplifying the moral palate into black and white, you’re misleading legions of gamers who, to be fair, may not give a damn anyway. But look at Far Cry 2, a shooter with a similar setting – moral ambiguity wasn’t a facet of the game, it was the game. It unsettled gamers (or at least unsettled me) into viewing the setting as a character itself. Resident Evil 5’s treatment of Africa, while not necessarily racist, is certainly crass and damnable.

Descending my soapbox, I should say I’m excited to explore the Mercenaries mode. A staple of the Resident Evil games, Mercenaries tasks the player with killing as many zombies as they can before a time limit expires. I dumped hours into RE4’s Mercenaries mode, and I can’t imagine much has changed in the sequel. Certainly nothing else has.

Capcom has promised a complete reboot with Resident Evil 6. The question is: in five years, will I even care?

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